While speaking at Credit Suisse’s Convergence conference, Verizon’s CTO Tony Melone, said that the company’s much anticipated 4G LTE smartphones are still on track to be released in the first half of this year which gives them till June. The company admitted that they are still working through the issues of launching devices on new technology which is understandable.

Our issue with this is that the company needs to be clear on this whole thing, if they are having more issues than anticipated then just tell the customers that. They need to stop advertising all this coming soon stuff and just get the tech stabilized and launched (and get their retailers under control). We also have no idea what the pricing schemes on these new devices will look like, we expect them to be more expensive than their 3G counterparts but how much more no one really knows. We won’t even get into the HTC Thunderbolt issues but you can read about them here.

When Melone was asked why the LTE smartphones are taking so long to get to market he responded with this statement.

I guess our expectations change, but we had said first half of this year at CES, quite frankly, we think that exceeded people’s expectations. A year ago, people didn’t believe that there would be LTE smartphones in 2011. First half of the year is what we promised, first half of the year is still on track. So we don’t believe there are any new or surprising issues. I think what we’re facing is what you would expect, and that is a new technology, you are working through issues. And we anticipated that, and we are pleased at how we are working through issues. And as I said, you are going to see LTE smartphones on the network as promised, before the first half — before the second half of the year, by the end of the second quarter.

There have been lots of rumors about the Thunderbolt being terrible as far as battery life but Melone said that it wasn’t any one issue that was holding the technology up. So what do you guys think, should Verizon just stop talking about 4G until they have something tangible that they can put into our hands, right now they are just playing with our emotions right?

I am the Co-Ceo of DLT Digital Media. We are a company that is focused on developing new and innovative web properties in addition to developing WordPress based web sites for others. But before I was all that, I was a gamer.